


Wow. You Suck.

by im_ashamed



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Modern AU, swimming lessons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 12:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12013059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/im_ashamed/pseuds/im_ashamed
Summary: You can learn to love through correspondence, but not how to swim.(Sombra teaches Satya how to swim. Modern/Contemporary Au, they both work at Vishkar Corporation)





	Wow. You Suck.

It wasn’t that Satya didn’t like Sombra. She didn’t trust any of the white hats Vishkar had hired, and she thought that purple highlights were ridiculous on anyone over the age of fifteen, but she didn’t dislike Sombra herself. She mostly thought of her as the woman who called her ‘chica’ for no discernible reason.

Like when she perched on the edge of Symmetra’s desk in the morning and asked for her new assignment by saying, “What are we in for today, chica?” 

“Firewall maintenance.” Satya said, and handed her the flash drive she had been given for this very purpose.

Sombra shook her head and took a sip of coffee. It was in a take away cup rather than a mug, but Satya still had the urge to throw a tarp over her desk just to be safe. 

“I hate how everything slows down in the summer.”

“Mmm.” Satya said, which was the best way of avoiding small talk.

“Are you going to that pool thing on Friday?”

“No, I don’t care for that sort of thing.”

“Tell me about it. Awkward small talk and chlorine.” Sombra shivered dramatically and Satya slid a plastic folder across her desk to a spot beneath where Sombra’s drink hovered.

“Hmm.”

For some reason Sombra took that as a cue to lean into Satya a bit and lower her voice. “I know it’s snobby to say around here, but there’s nothing like the ocean.”

“Oh.”

Sombra’s face fell. “Have you never been?”

To the ocean? Which ocean? Satya knew it was a simple enough statement (to Sombra) that she shouldn’t ask for clarification, but it really wasn’t sure what the woman was asking her.

“So where did you learn to swim?” Sombra said, reclining again.

“Um,” Satya had never been asked this question so directly before. She should have had a lie prepared, but Sombra was wearing her purple contacts again, and Satya was often distracted by the disturbing way they distorted her eyes. Light glinted off of them and made them glow in a way human eyes never should. 

Sombra cocked her head. Then she smiled. It was slow and horrifying. Cockroaches would have skittered away from it’s glare. Sombra leaned over Satya’s desk, coffee cup tilting dangerously, but she was so close to Satya that all she could see were those violently violet eyes.

“Do you not know how to swim?” Sombra said, whispering the words like they were the most delightful secret. 

“I know how to swim.” Satya said, but even if that had been true Sombra’s closeness had flustered her enough for it to seem a lie. 

“Okay.” Sombra nodded like she had made a decision. She hopped off Satya’s desk and a wave of relief crashed over her, before descending into dread when the other woman said. “Eight am Sunday, the Y on fifth. Wear something you don’t mind getting wet.”

So there Satya was, at eight am that Sunday, on the sidewalk outside the Y on fifth. To say she was terrified was an understatement. Sombra hadn’t been in the office for most of the week, but when she had shown up on Thursday she had brought Satya coffee and smiled at her like they shared a secret. The coffee was awful, so sour as to be acidic, but Satya had drunk the entire thing for the same reason she was here—she didn’t trust Sombra enough to act civilly if she was displeased.

“Good morning!” Sombra said, and Satya almost jumped out of her skin. Sombra looked her up and down and nodded. “Cute.” She said, nodding at Satya’s outfit. It was a long skirt over a black leotard she often danced in. “You look good in blue.”

“Thank you.” Satya said, and refrained from saying that Sombra looked surprisingly normal in a band t-shirt and jeans. Even her hair was french braided in such a way that her highlights were diminished. She was almost boring.

“Come on.” Sombra lead Satya around the back of the building to an alley with a dumpster, and a metal door with a card slot and keypad. She typed something into the pad and the door popped open.

“Do you work here?” Satya said as she followed Sombra inside. Sombra was a freelancer and  New York was expensive. It wasn’t an absurd thought.

Sombra laughed. She went down a flight of stairs and took a sharp left into a locker room. It smelled dank and sharp, two scents that should not coexist, but the fact that they were told Satya it was a chemical, probably chlorine. If this is what Sombra was complaining about it wasn’t so bad. 

That was when Sombra whipped her shirt off, and Satya tried to turn away so suddenly she spun in a circle. Luckily, underneath Sombra’s shirt was another, tighter, shirt. 

“When you’re on the beach you want as much help avoiding a sunburn as you can get.” Sombra explained as she stepped out of her jeans. Her bottoms looked like bike shorts. “You should leave your clothes here so they don’t get wet.”

Satay was embaressed. If she took off her skirt she would be baring more skin than Sombra. Still, it was too nice a skirt to ruin, so she unwound it and folded it carefully before opening a locker. 

“Don’t bother,” Sombra said, “It’s not like anyone is going to come in.”

Satay put her skirt in the locker anyway and glanced at the number before saying, “How did you get them to let us in here while it was closed?”

“Pool’s this way.” Sombra said, and began walking.

Satya caught her wrist. “Sombra, please tell me we did not break into this building.”

Sombra cracked an uneasy grin. “Look, if anyone shows up who cares enough to throw us out, we tell them the door was unlocked and we thought it would be cool if we had the pool all to ourselves.”  
Satya dug her nails into Sombra’s skin. “This is illegal.” She hissed.

Sombra rolled her eyes and jerked her arm free. “No one is going to arrest us for walking into a Y, okay? Do you want your swimming lesson or not?”

So it really was a private lesson. Satya had been pretty sure, but it felt good to hear Sombra say it. Not that she was crazy about how they were going about it, but she probably wasn’t going to get a chance like this again. 

There weren’t any large bodies of water around where Satya was born, none with free access at any rate, and by the time Vishkar ‘discovered’ her she was old enough that they probably assumed she knew how to swim already. She spent several years avoiding any possibility of being submerged in front of other people, and her prosthetic made for a handy excuse. By the time Satya began to think it might be nice to know how to swim properly she was almost sixteen and far too embarrassed that she lacked such a basic skill to ask for help.

“Why are you doing this, anyway?” Satya asked once the two of them were standing hip deep in the pool. The chlorine smell was seriously burning her nose, but the windows brushing the ceiling of the half underground room were fogged up with steam and the lukewarm water was soothing as it swirled around her. 

“Everyone should know how to swim. It’s like cooking, or reading, or linux.”

Satya snorted and Sombra gave her a wounded look, as though that had not been intended as a joke, but then she laughed too. 

“Okay, let’s start with the basics, can you float?”

“According to the laws of physics, yes.”

Sombra crossed her arms over her chest, “Okay, lie down.”

Satya tilted backward for a second, but then jerked back up. Even knowing that she wasn’t actually falling, some part of her brain told her that just tipping backwards was a bad idea. Instead she crouched down and tried to relax into the water, but she couldn’t convince her feet to leave the pool’s bottoms. Inside her head alarm bells were going off, and the oft-quoted fact that you can drown in two inches of water was battling the suspiciousness of Sombra’s sudden desire to get her alone in a pool for her attention.

“Come here.” Sombra grabbed Satya’s upper arm and dragged her weightless body through the pool towards the deep end. Satya jerked away from her just before the water became too high for her to place her feet firmly on the ground.

“Okay, even more basic, can you tread water?”

“Yes.” 

Sombra gently pulled Satya forward, till her toes couldn’t brush the bottom of the pool. “Try that.”

Satya had looked up what treading water meant once, when she thought she could learn to swim from research, and she remembered that it meant you moved your legs like you were walking and rolled your arms in small circles. 

She immediately sank. 

Sombra hauled her back up, choking and sputtering. 

“Wow. You suck.”

Satya would have snapped back at her, but she was busy trying to get her hair out of her eyes so she could get the water out of her eyes.

Sombra laughed. “You didn’t even bring a hair tie? You really suck.”  
“First of all—“ Satya blinked at the black ponytail holder in front of her. Sombra’s braid was slowly unraveling, revealing her magenta high lights.

“Here,” Sombra explained what Satya did wrong as she wrangled her hair into a low ponytail. “You have to relax. You and the water aren’t having a fist fight. Treading water just means keeping your head up. All you have to do is push a little so it stays that way.”

“I feel stupid.” Satya said. 

“Swimming has nothing to do with being smart. You should see some of the kids I grew up with—swam like fish, thought like rocks.”

Satya smiled at that, and Sombra guided her away from the pools edge, her hand steady on Satya’s arm.

“Right now, just relax. I’ve got you, but the water is going to go up to your chin.”

Though her left arm-the one Sombra held her by-remained rigid, Satya let the rest of her body relax, swaying slightly in the water.

“Okay, move your arms like this.” Sombra made loose circles with her left arm.

Satya tried to mimic her, although she had a feeling she couldn’t match Sombra’s grace.

“Move your legs really slowly, just pump them up and down,” Sombra’s knee bumped Satya’s. “Like this. Can you tell what I’m doing?”

 _You’re getting way too close,_ Satya thought, but she nodded. There was still a burning sense of shame that she couldn’t do what Sombra had probably mastered when she was five, but she suddenly felt that focusing on those feelings was better than whatever Sombra was doing to her by floating so close.

She could feel Sombra’s hand sliding off of her arm, but Satya knew if she panicked she would one hundred percent sink, whereas if she just kept moving her body in the rhythm she was developing she only had a seventy percent chance of drowning. 

“You’re doing it!” Sombra said, and clapped her hands together at the surface of the water so it splashed around them. 

“Really?” This was it? It wasn’t exactly fun, but Satya was suspicious that it was too easy. 

“I mean, this is lesson zero: How Not to Drown, but that’s really all you have to do.”

Embarrassment prickled along Satya’s spine. “I really wanted to learn some proper strokes.”

Sombra made a face that said she was too polite to laugh, but not well trained enough to keep Satya from knowing that.”

“I do!” Satya said. Her conviction made her lose concentration, and she sank low enough for water to splash into her mouth. She panicked, flailed, and had to be pulled back to the side of the pool. 

“You’ll have to learn to float first.” Sombra said, but she wasn’t laughing at Satya anymore.

“I know how to tread water,” Satya said, “I must know how to float.”

“Okay, then relax.”

Satya knew that it looked like she was just staring at Sombra, but she couldn’t let go of the edge of the pool. The part of your brain that keeps you from doing dumb things like touching fire even though it’s pretty, and walking in the snow in your nightgown even though it’s romantic, was currently keeping Satya’s fingers locked around the slick tiles. 

“Let’s go back to the shallow end, and I’ll teach you how to float.” Sombra said, and pushed off from the wall. Satya followed her, holding tight until she could walk properly again. 

Sombra held out her hands, palms up, “Lie back onto my hands. I’ll hold you till you get the hang of it.”

Satya knew any complaint about this being for children would be met with some sharp quip, so she sank down and leaned back until one of Sombra’s hands was on the small of her back and the other was on her upper thigh. She hadn’t realized she had closed her eyes until Sombra started talking again. 

“Tell me what’s holding you up right now.” Sombra said. She had begun rocking Satya side to side slightly. Not enough to scare her, just so she could feel the hair floating around her tickling her ears. 

“You.” Satya said. 

“Bzzzt!” Sombra said, “No way I could hold you like this on the ground. It’s the water that’s keeping you up. But you trust me, right?”

Satya wanted to say she didn’t, but she had broken into a building with Sombra, and at the very least she was trusting her to keep her from drowning. Plus, with her eyes closed she didn’t have to worrying about reacting to what ever was happing on Sombra’s face. She nodded.

“That’s the only thing thats keeping you from being a good swimmer.”

“Besides absolutely zero experience?”

“Shush,” Sombra laughed. “Yes. If you would just trust that your body and the water-physics and biology-won’t let you drown, then you’ll be fine.” She booped Satya’s nose and her eyes flew open.

That little speech had been a ruse. Sombra raised her arms and wiggled her fingers, and if Satya did not want to look like a complete idiot yet again she had to lie still, gazing up at her. Her hair was tangled, plastered to her neck and forehead, and though Satya knew she hadn’t been wearing her contacts since she first greeted her on the street, she hadn’t realized that Sombra’s eyes were such a soft, warm shade of brown. 

“See?” Sombra smiled, “You won’t fall.”

But she was. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I would really appreciate feedback on this fic since I'm not sure if Satya sounds completely natural or not. (Also, depending on what company made that keypad it could be very easy to bypass, or so the internet tells me.)


End file.
